toilet paper

TL;DR: The phrase ‘Black lives matter’ carries an implicit ‘too’ at the end; it’s saying that black lives should also matter. Saying ‘all lives matter’ is dismissing the very problems that the phrase is trying to draw attention to.

137 of 509, or 27% of my Facebook friends, are publicly displaying their support for full equality, regardless of sexual orientation. That’s a huge percentage, even for an admittedly self-selected group of contacts, most of whom are highly likely to share my general beliefs.

Violence, naked force, has settled more issues in history than has any other factor, and the contrary opinion is wishful thinking at its worst. Breeds that forget this basic truth have always paid for it with their lives and their freedoms.

In general, I think we need to move away from the premise that being a good person is a fixed immutable characteristic and shift towards seeing being good as a practice. And it is a practice that we carry out by engaging with our imperfections. We need to shift towards thinking that being a good person is like being a clean person. Being a clean person is something you maintain and work on every day.

But what the story really says, this story men made up to hold women down, is that women have the power to change the world. Women have the power to throw the world into chaos and they do it because the world as it is isn’t good enough.

Saved here for my own reference, and possibly others’ if they should stumble across it: the easiest workflow I’ve found yet for converting DVDs or Blu-Rays for personal use on OS X, including OCR conversion of subtitles in either VOBSUB (DVD) or PGS (Blu-Ray) format to text-based .srt files suitable for use as soft subs.

I think Obama’s general idea is a good one, and I support it and the thinking behind it. I just wish I could be more optimistic that students in Washington would actually have a chance to take advantage of it.